Hearing of Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation,
Subcommittee on Science and Space
Chairman William Palin, R-AK, presiding
March 16, 2015
Chairman Palin: At the request of the Department of Homeland Security, there will be no record of this meeting. Testimony will not be published as usual on the Committee website. There will be no transcript. And the TV cameras will be turned off. NOW, please!
Excellent. I can now extend the committee’s welcome to the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Honorable Frederick B. Hoover. Mr. Hoover, when you asked to speak to the committee, you said you had an urgent matter to put before us.
Secretary Hoover: Indeed, Mr. Palin. But first I would like to extend my thanks for your gracious welcome. I am delighted to be here today, and I hope that what I have to say will both interest you and motivate the necessary actions.
To begin, have you ever looked at the Islamic symbol? I mean the crescent and star. Slide, please.
The crescent is of course the crescent moon. As everyone in this room is surely aware, it represents the illuminated portion of a sphere, the Moon. The interior of the crescent is the unilluminated—and therefore dark—portion of the Moon’s circle. Yet the star is clearly within the circle of which the crescent marks one edge.
It is clearly impossible for the star to represent a genuine star. The Moon is solid, and we cannot see through it. And there are no stars—or other lights—between the Moon and Earth.
Geoffrey Bogart, R-IA: Mr. Hoover, isn’t it possible that they got it wrong?
Secretary Hoover: Mr. Bogart, you know as well as I do that in the current international political climate, it is highly unwise to suggest that any group, much less the Islamics, is or ever was that stone-blind ignorant.
Chairman Palin: Then you are suggesting…
Secretary Hoover: Indeed. The symbol came into common use at the time of the Ottoman Empire, but it is actually much older, and it is clear that at some point early skywatchers actually saw a light in that location on the Moon. Our analysts believe that this would have been shortly after Mohammed died in 632 AD. Before that time, however, Moslems believe that he was taken up into heaven on a winged horse to visit God. This is clearly impossible, since winged horses don’t exist and ordinary horses don’t fly. It seems very likely that advanced technology such as a tractor beam was involved.
Chairman Palin: A tractor beam?
Secretary Hoover: The idea is a staple in second-rate science fiction novels and movies. We have no idea how to make one, but if we could find one and copy it, there are a great many ways it would make the work of my Department easier.
Chairman Palin: I can just imagine. But where could you find one?
Secretary Hoover: Our analysts believe the light on the Moon—the star in the crescent—was probably a moonbase.
Chairman Palin: Almost a millennium and a half ago.
Secretary Hoover: You sound skeptical, Mr. Palin, but yes. Our analysts, however, do not believe the ancient Islamics had that kind of advanced technology themselves. We suspect that Earth was visited by some other species, one capable of space travel. They built a moonbase and lived there for a time, presumably studying us.
Chairman Palin: And beaming up Mohammed.
Secretary Hoover: Tractor-beaming, yes. And then they left. We expect the moonbase is still there. It might have been damaged by moonquakes or meteorite impacts, but there’s no weather on the Moon. It should be largely intact.
Christine Newcomb, D-NJ: That is a very large truth to keep quiet for so long.
Secretary Hoover: Indeed. But the Islamics have displayed an enormous talent for keeping secret conspiracies secret. After all, It took us a long time to find Osama bin Laden. Still, all secrets come into the open eventually. We are investigating possible Islamic links with the Illuminati and Rosicrucians.
Mr. Bogart: I presume you have examined the area with telescopes.
Secretary Hoover: Slide, please. The red circle marks the target zone. The next slide zooms in. We were not able to get a great amount of detail, but please note the roughly square area to the left. It is very smooth, with very few pockmarks. This indicates that it is no more than a few thousand years old. On the right, the round area appears to be a low dome. The actual moonbase, we suspect, lies under it. As do any technological secrets left behind by our visitors.
Chairman Palin: I think I see where you are going. Need I remind you that NASA no longer flies spacecraft? The Shuttles have all been retired. The Constellation program was aborted.
Secretary Hoover: But NASA is funding the development of private spacecraft. Additional funding would accelerate that effort, and since national security is at stake…
Chairman Palin: National security?
Secretary Hoover: The last few years have seen an unfortunate number of leaks of government documents. That is why I insisted there be no record of this meeting. Even so, if the Islamics parallel our thinking… Well, they have the wealth to commission a moon-ship from SpaceX or Virgin Galactic. And if they obtain the aliens’ tractor-beam and weapons technology…
Mr. Bogart: We can prevent that. We have the Arms Export Control Act, and we can pass new laws if necessary.
Secretary Hoover: Of course. They could also hire people away from these companies and mount their own effort. It would take them a little longer, but not forever. We need to move quickly. …
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WIKILEAKS TARGETS DHS!
CNN News, June 7, 2016
This morning Wikileaks released its latest trove of once-secret documents. This batch of 20,000 top-secret memos and reports came from the Department of Homeland Security. And Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had better stay out of the USA if he knows what’s good for him.
Among the gems is a proposal—dated just a month ago—to replace Tera-Hz or T-ray scanners, still raising privacy objections years after their installation at every airport and train station in the country, with high-tech pills. These pills would also release T-rays, but the images they produced would show people from the inside out. Samples included in the report looked more like x-rays than nudie pics.
Another gem was a “Report on the Islamic Moonbase Project.” Apparently, DHS believes that ancient Arabs had a base on the moon from which they beamed Mohammed—on his horse–up to heaven. There’s no one there now, but the ruins of the base may contain technological secrets—such as inside-out scanner pills?–that DHS wants. At least, that’s the line they seem to have used to convince Congress to fund development of a top-secret moonship to go have a look.
An anonymous DHS spokesperson said, “If Julian Assange steps foot in this country, we will send him to Guantanomo so fast his head will spin. If he were a U.S. citizen we could charge him with treason. Since he isn’t, he’s a terrorist and a spy, and so is whoever passed him these documents.”
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SAUDI ARABIA LAUNCHES SPACE PROGRAM
Dubai Times, February 3, 2017
King Nayef bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia announced yesterday that Prince Badr would surrender his position as head of the National Guard to become the founding director of the Al Saud Spaceport.
In an interview, Prince Badr revealed that Saudi Arabia is making rapid progress on a moonship. “We hired the very best Arabian engineers,” he said with a broad smile. “Many of them had been working for American spacecraft builders, and they knew many American secrets.”
When asked why Saudi Arabia needed a space program, he said, “We are indebted to the American Department of Homeland Security for discovering that when Mohammed undertook his famous Night Journey as described in Surah 17:1*, that “greatest and most distant mosque” which he visited to meet with Allah and receive his instruction was actually on the Moon. However, the Americans are planning to return to the Moon, this time to invade Allah’s own mosque.”
After a pause, he added, “We are raising the price of oil in order to hasten the project. We have every intention of getting there first to defend Allah’s mosque. We will not let the infidels defile it.”
* Surah 17:1–“Praise be to Him who took His servant by night from the sacred mosque in Mecca to the most distant mosque, whose environs we did bless, so that we might show him some of our signs, for He is the All-Hearing and All-Seeing One.”
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Astronauts to Be Armed!
Fox News, September 6, 2018
The crew of January’s Moon mission will be armed. According to a NASA spokesman, “We know that the Saudi Arabians are planning a mission to coincide with our own. They may or may not be planning to interfere with our mission, but if they do we will be prepared to treat them accordingly. Terrorists will not be permitted to interfere with mission objectives.”
Yee-Haw! It’s side-arms not blasters, folks, but maybe we can finally give a spaceship a real Buck Rogers name. Let’s name it after Starfleet’s Excalibur! Cast your votes on our blog!
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MOONBASE LIGHTS UP!
CNN News, December 25, 2018
Astronomers report that at 2:18 AM ET, the target zone for next month’s Moon mission suddenly began to glow. If there really is an ancient moonbase there, someone turned the lights on.
A NASA spokesman cautioned that it has been 1400 years since the last sign of activity there. She smiled as she said, “It is unlikely that any occupants suddenly rolled out of bed and started brewing coffee. Or whatever their equivalent is. I just know that after sleeping that long, I would want a lot of coffee!”
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THE MOONRACE IS ON!
CNN News, January 18, 2019
NASA’s latest spaceship, Excalibur, took off from Cape Canaveral at 2 PM this afternoon. The ship was built by SpaceX, and performance was nominal as they say at the Kennedy Space Center. Excalibur is already in orbit, with its crew doing last-minute checks before initiating the burn that will kick the ship out of Earth orbit and on its way to the Moon.
Once Excalibur is in Moon orbit on Monday, the descent module will separate from the rest of the ship before landing. A NASA spokesperson says Moonbase lights are still on, but astronomers have seen no signs of activity. “It looks like we’ll have to ring the doorbell,” he said.
The Saudi Arabian ship, named al Buraq after the horse Mohammed rode to heaven, launched at 2:30 PM. Right now there’s no telling who will arrive first.
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MOONBASE ALIENS LAUNCH SHIP
CNN News, January 20, 2019, 1:15 PM ET
According to NASA, at 10:13 this morning, Eastern Time, a hemispherical object appeared on the landing field next to the moonbase, lifted off the ground, and flew into space. According to a NASA spokesperson, “When last seen, it was heading away from Earth and already moving faster than anything we can put into space. Furthermore, it is not a rocket. There was no visible rocket flame.”
When asked whether this meant the aliens were leaving before our astronauts could ring the doorbell, He said only, “I hope not.”
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MOONBASE EXPLODES!
Fox News, January 20, 2019, 2:15 PM ET
Barely hours after the alien spaceship left the moonbase, terrorist bombs destroyed the moonbase. A NASA spokesman insisted that there is no reason to suspect terrorists since both the Saudi and American moonships have not yet reached lunar orbit. But Fox News has already received claims of responsibility from an al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. How they got their bombs to the Moon remains to be determined.
The NASA spokesman said, “We think the aliens left and destroyed the base behind them, probably to keep us from learning their technologies.”
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SAUDIS HAPPY TO AVOID SHOOT-OUT
CNN NEWS, January 20, 2019, 3 PM ET
Saudi Arabian Ambassador Adel A. Al-Jubeir has informed the press that the explosion of Allah’s Mosque on the Moon is a disaster of global proportions. “The Mosque’s staff appear to have left before the moonships al Buraq and Excalibur could arrive in order to avoid unseemly conflict on the doorstep. It is always good to avoid conflict, but we do wish a different method could have been chosen. A great many people have been eagerly awaiting our astronauts’ reports on the Mosque, its contents, and its staff.”
“At least we now have moonships, and physicists at King Saud University in Riyadh are already studying images of the departing starship. Soon we may have starships too.”
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FROM CAPTAIN DIN DIN HARIGHMUN, STARSHIP BELLE OF HEAVEN
TO PROJECT STIMULUS BASE
C4D77F, AA25D
Mission accomplished. It’s been a long wait, and there goes the neighborhood, but we’re on the way home.
~~~
Tom Easton recently retired as Professor of Science at Thomas College in Waterville, Maine. Now he works on textbooks and science fiction anthologies such as Impossible Futures, coedited with Judith K. Dial and available from Pink Narcissus Press (www.pinknarc.com). The idea for this story came from staring at the “Coexist” bumper sticker.
The Islamic Moonbase Conspiracy is copyright © Tom Easton. All Rights Reserved.
Title artwork is copyright © Duncan Long. All Rights Reserved. (Title text & formatting by Kermit Woodall.)
